The End We Start From – Megan Hunter

‘We are told not to panic, the most panic-inducing instruction known to man.’

This book was one of my accidental acquisitions, I was searching for a book for my friend’s birthday and there was ‘second one half-price’ so I thought, why not. I noticed it thanks to it’s beautiful cover, I like green color a lot and the cover is not overcrowded, but manages to tell a story on its own.

It is a short and intimate book. It is also a dystopia. You may ask how exactly can the two be combined? In a sort of fair-tale way.

Our narrator is still pregnant at the beginning of the book. When she gives birth and is still in hospital London is flooded. All of it. There is nowhere to go back to. So they go to her parents in law. When they perish they continue to move north. Things are not getting better. And yet it all feels somehow calm. We’re in the fumes of post-natal hormones. In a mother-child bubble. Floating in the world that has come unstuck.

There is of course a reason why I am writing in short sentences. Hunter keeps her whole book in this style. Short almost detached sentences, forming equally short paragraphs. The detachment is from the external world, all focus on the mother and the baby. People they meet do not have names, only first initials. External world is dealt with only if there is no other choice or if it becomes too directly threatening. It is a musing fairy tale. Interesting reading experience. Interesting debut.

P.S. if anyone scrolls this way down, I really don’t know why the publisher saw it fitting to have a recommendation by Benedict Cumberbatch among others on the back cover. I’m not sure he is my literary authority. But maybe it’s just me.